Celebrating the power of possibility.
I'm Rabbi Yassi and I believe anything is possible.
This is Anything is Possible. Great stories about great people whose lives prove that anything is possible.
Part two of my interview with Rabbi Yassi, thank you for being with us.
Thank you for having me.
We were talking about the school. So you grew up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
You were called to be a rabbi. You go through rabbinical training.
You and your wife, now your wife in different cities.
She was in Chicago. You were in New York. You knew you were going to go somewhere and you land in Knoxville.
Who makes the decision that you land in Knoxville?
So about six or seven months after we were married and we knew from the get-go that we're going to go,
we're going to join that club and move somewhere, at the time I was working for headquarters in Brooklyn on a project.
I went over to the person on top of me. I said, my wife and I are ready to move out.
Help me, guide me through. How do I navigate? Where do I go?
And he was at the time working on a list of different places that were available throughout the world.
So he says, come into my office. And he gives me three places.
Stockholm, Sweden, Eugene, Oregon, and Knoxville, Tennessee.
Look into it. See which one you want. So I went home with a little paragraph on each.
We spoke it through. My wife and I in Stockholm, Sweden, it's Europe. We're both American boys.
We'll leave that for a European couple.
Even though there are lots of Americans that are out in Europe and vice versa Europeans that are in the U.S.
and very successful. But that was our decision. Eugene, Oregon was extremely artsy.
And we were like down to earth. We were like down to earth.
So we looked into Knoxville, started to connect with people here.
And here we are 23 years later.
Tell me about your family.
We got married in 1999. My wife and I in Chicago. It was a cold Sunday.
And we moved to Knoxville in May of 21.
We were blessed with a challenge for several years of not having children.
And some ups and downs and going through what many couples go through.
And on October 11, 2006, my son Mendel was born.
And now we're six children down. I have three boys, three girls. My oldest is 17.
Just got his license. Wow, what a time fly.
And he's following my footsteps in that he's in rabbinical school.
Really?
And he's like, he said, I'm doing, he's hoping to come back to Knoxville.
Look at the smile that's on your face.
Oh, aye. For us, that would be amazing.
But yeah, I have a daughter who's in high school in Chicago.
There's no past our school, which is fifth grade.
There's no elementary. There's no middle school, Jewish middle school.
And my kids do an online school in which they're joined by children from families like ours throughout the world.
So she has friends. I had my older daughter finished.
This was her first year away from home, ninth grade. She's doing in Chicago.
My second daughter is in seventh grade. She's finishing seventh grade.
And she has friends from Columbia, a country of Columbia.
Gainesville, Florida. They're always talking about the Gators and the Vols.
And I'm really friends from all over.
And my third daughter is going to be joining the online school.
She might come next year. She's finishing fifth grade.
So they do that. And then at some point they leave home for high school.
And then they come home for a holiday.
And now we're a whole family again with Passover.
So I went to a Shabbat dinner at a residence here in town. And it was so beautiful.
Then when I came by the school, I think a couple of your children were at the school that day.
And just this family, this community, it was so wonderful.
Shabbat dinner was just, it was fantastic to see these traditions that have been around for millennia, right?
Yep.
Carried on in much the same way.
Speak to that, that continuity of faith and the shaping effect that it has over time.
Because especially within the Orthodox, the practices, you can go anywhere in the world and it's going to be exactly what it is.
Right. You say the Orthodox, but the reality is that some level of Shabbat is many Jews, even those who are not necessarily Orthodox.
You know, we say that the labels, there's so many different denominations of Judaism.
From my perspective, those are all labels. A Jew is a Jew.
And that's true also in terms of Shabbat is Shabbat for everyone.
We have families that are from the whole spectrum of Judaism that join us for Friday night or Shabbat day.
But I think the most fun memories that I have as a child is Friday night and Shabbat because the whole week you have the hustle and bustle of going on and my father worked and you know, and it was sometimes he would come home late and you know, he did get to see him, he didn't get to see him.
Friday we knew that there's nothing and we did not grow up with cell phones. You know, those didn't exist. But it wasn't so much today when I do it, I say, you know, it's a day that I disconnect from everything else.
I don't know, I think that's the negative. Focus on the positive. It's a day I connect with my family in the most powerful way. There's nothing that can disturb us.
And that, you know, the women usher in Friday night by lighting the Shabbat candles, that is a tradition that has been going on, like you said, from millennia.
And there's so many stories associated with that. You know, throughout the Inquisition when there was the Moranos and you know, the priest that busted the Jewish family right when the mother was lighting Shabbat candles.
And all of a sudden he has this memory that when he was a child, he saw that. Here he came to disrupt the family and he finds himself embracing what was taken away from him by force.
Something that he totally forgot. But there's, you know, the Friday night candles are this light that just shines and continues to shine.
Here's how I got, you helped me with something that I don't know if you'd know the impact of it. As a child, I was told the story of King Solomon.
I read the story of King Solomon and he is at Gibbon, high place, and he's been handed the keys to the kingdom and he is but a child. And I got to lead a nation. I got to lead a group of people.
I have no idea. So we offer us sacrifice. God shows up to him in the dream. He says, what do you want? And he said, I need wisdom.
And I said, wait a minute, you don't want something for yourself. You've given me this assignment. Something outside of me that's bigger than me, bigger than what's inside of me.
And he said, because you didn't ask for all these other things, now I give you wisdom. And I was drawn to that story.
So I started to study the life of King Solomon and I started to study deeply the Proverbs. And I remember reaching out to you and saying, hey, I really want to know more about the Proverbs.
And you brought me a set of books. And it is a compilation of some of the greatest teachers going verse by verse through the Proverbs.
Unbelievable. I mean, my mind was just all the things I learned just studying that book. And I've never had an opportunity to thank you publicly for pouring into me in that way because you gave me several books that I poured over and studied.
I have them here at my office. And the life of King Solomon and the wisdom has become a life journey for me. So let's talk about King Solomon in the Jewish tradition and how great he was.
First of all, I'm honored that I was so helpful. But I guess I'm honored that I was God's messenger here and just being sort of the intermediate. King Solomon's text is, like you said, it's mind blowing.
It's the wisdom that's there. And it says that he had the ability to take the most esoteric concepts and bring it down sometimes with 3,000 parables.
Right.
And each time was just another level, another level, another level.
I've heard that they are arranged in such a way that it's almost like Russian dolls. You think you've unpacked it and then there's more inside and then there's more inside. And the deeper you get, the deeper it gets.
Right.
Absolutely. And before we spoke about, there's always another aha moment.
Oh, wow. Like you put two and two together and like you're constantly learning. You just have to, you know, it says in Jewish law, it speaks of the laws of purity and impurity, the spiritual purity and impurity.
It says that a vessel that is filled cannot become impure because it can't, the impurity cannot go in. In our minds, it's that way too. If my mind is empty and not so much empty, we're talking about empty, my ego is not obstructing.
And I'm not filling it with other types of garbage. When you study, you're open, humility, it seeps it in. We say kids are sponges. We too can be sponges as long as we don't obstruct it with our ego.
And studying is something that is, it's the most fascinating thing, the fact that we can constantly learn something and gain from it and understand something that helps us in different situations.
What I found amazing about the wisdom literature in particular, Proverbs, is it Michelet?
Michelet. Right. Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, those two books is, it seems to be inexhaustible. So you read a proverb when you're 20 years old and it has this level of meaning, you read the same proverb when you're 60 and it resonates a different way.
There's one proverb that I wanted to kind of tease out with you. That is Proverbs 1 verse 7, I think it is, but I don't even know if they're arranged in chapters and verses, but this is my limited understanding of it.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Unpack that for me.
So there's fear of the Lord. What does fear mean? Am I afraid of Him?
It's reverence.
Reverence.
It's awe.
It's awe. Now there is a level of, I'm afraid, you know, when a child is a child and you say, no, don't do that or this is what will happen. That's fear. I'm afraid. I'm not going to do that.
But as you mature, it's, you know, you want to listen to your parent out of respect and reverence. So it's not afraid. It's more of a reverence. And that's really what, you know, what that is referring to.
There are two types of serving God. Do we serve God out of reverence or out of love? And they're both necessary. You can't do one without the other.
But the fundamental is the reverence. And Kabbalah explains that it's like wings. It's like a bird with wings.
Love, love of God and reverence of God, fear of God is like the two wings that allow us to go up in the heights. Sometimes you need one more than the other. Sometimes you need the combination.
But the foundation is the reverence without respect, without that reverence. It's, there's something, you know, I remember as a child, I was listening to a story once of, there was a rabbi traveling with his wagon driver somewhere on the road in some town in, you know, in Russia.
And the wagon driver was really hungry and they weren't getting to their destination. So he tells the rabbi, he says, there's a field here. There's an orchard of apples. I'm going to go grab an apple.
You look out and see if someone's looking and call me if someone's looking. And as he's about to reach that apple, the rabbi says, someone's looking, someone's looking.
And he jumps down and he gets into the wagon and, you know, rushes away and turns to the rabbi. I didn't see anyone. He says, God was looking.
And then the rabbi tells him, but that's just the beginning. That you were afraid that someone was looking. God's always looking. You don't want to disappoint him.
So there's, you know, there's the different levels, but it's the beginning of all wisdom. What is wisdom?
So let's go back to Chabad. Chachma, which is wisdom, which is what King Solomon asked for, is a very general word for wisdom. Is it skill?
There's a skill involved in it. It's an intellectual faculty that we have. It's the aha moment. You're thinking about something and then you have that lightning, that flash.
You cannot yet tell me what it is, but you have something there. You still have to unpack it before you can tell me what it is. That's the next level of bina.
And then even bina, which is the unpacking of the Chachma, of that flash, is not the final moment. What are you going to do with it? That's da, which is comprehension.
We talked about the da, is when it moves from intellectual to action.
Correct. So an example for that is, I remember reading this example when I was studying this in the Hasidic philosophy, the Kabbalah.
So imagine the, and this is not how it happened, but just think about it this way, the doctor that's thinking, says, you don't have too many patients with issues, with lung issues.
And if I look on their charts, most of them are smoking. Is there a correlation between the two?
And he starts doing his research and asking his colleagues, and he comes to the conclusion that there's probably something there.
And he begins to tell his patients that smoking is not good for your health. But then does he stop smoking?
So you have the Chachma, the knowledge, that wisdom, you have the bina, which is you unpacked it. If you're lacking the da, the action is not, there's no action.
Yeah, when I pray in the morning, I ask for that every day specifically, is that it would move from here to here to here.
The reason I wanted to ask you about that is because I wanted you here today because you're sharing not only your faith and your family and your knowledge with me has been a blessing in me as a person,
but the study of the wisdom literature opened me up to whole new possibilities in my life, different kinds of possibilities. Number one, different things that I've accomplished because of that pursuit,
but the way in which it has refined me or redefined me because of that. And I don't know that I would have known those possibilities if along the way I hadn't met people like yourself that did more than just have a conversation.
You specifically said, I want to learn. And then the next day these books show up and I'm like, thank you for that.
With pleasure. Look, you know, there are lots of things in my career here that I do. Teaching is the most amazing thing that I can do, whether it's one-on-one or in a group, I love teaching because it was one of the greatest Jewish sages who said,
I studied so much from my teachers. From my students, I studied the most. I love it.
And that's really what it's all about, education. I think most conflicts, most misunderstanding, most wars, most frictions are a lack of education.
There's one proverb that says, well, there are a couple of them that says, a merry heart do good like a medicine, right?
A broken spirit rots the bones and it was talking about for teachers and doctors. This was especially when somebody is joyful in their teaching, it takes, it sits better with you.
And then there's another one that says, he who refreshes others or he who waters others will himself be watered. And thank you for refreshing me.
And thank you for doing so joyfully. Rabbi Yasee, thanks for being on Anything's Possibly.
Thank you so much for having me.